In a guest piece in the Sydney Morning Herald, Slate writer Farhad Manjoo argues that “Apple needs to do more than just change the iPhone design“. Quite surprisingly he equates design narrowly with the aesthetics of the device, arguing that when Apple “hits a bump in the road, its instinct is to rejig how its products look”.

I would like to respond to what I think is a misunderstanding for the nature of design in general and the design of end user devices in particular.

1) The first and most obvious misunderstanding is to equate design with aesthetics, the cosmetic side of design (what the thing looks like). Apple, its chief designer Jon Ivy and Steve Jobs in his day have argued at numerous occasions that design is much more and runs much deeper than just the cosmetic surface of a product.

Good design imagines new devices in their (yet-to-be-created) use contexts. In essence, design is about changing the world. It is about imagining new practices and make these happen by creating devices that are radically usable. This is what Apple does best. Apple is in the business of changing our world – great devices are the means for doing it (and they make lots of money in the process, because they are good at it). This is what the iPhone and iPad have done, they have changed how we communicate, work, compose music, serve our clients, how we play games, review academic papers, you name it.

2) However, the more significant misunderstanding is that we (as people who enjoy dealing with technology) extrapolate our own relationship with technology to the user. While geeks, technology commentators and all those people whose business is technology per se will naturally see devices as things with features, users normally don’t! This is an important point and not a trivial one. We have written about this in more depth elsewhere.

In essence, for users when devices are fully adopted and work properly they move into the background, they withdraw from experience, they are not things to be manipulated but rather a transparent means for doing stuff. This does not mean that I cannot look at it as a thing, but for it to function most effectively it needs to get out of the way.

When I work on the computer and I am absorbed in writing a text, all hardware and software should just get out of the way, it should inconspicuously function and let me do what I am doing. When working at our best we are in automatic mode, our body deals with the device while we can concentrate on the task. This is why I enjoy my Mac, it gets out of the way, it does not intrude on my tasks in the same way Windows used to do. The same applies to the iPhone or iPad.

End user devices should just work and make themselves invisible whenever we are surfing the web, tweeting, doing our banking or whatever else we’re doing with these devices. The device and app should simply be invisible if everything goes well. Apple makes this its goal, and it achieves this quite well in my view (it is an extra perk that the thing really looks good if I choose to bring it into view and marvel at its slick aesthetics). We know that Apple does this quite well, because Apple users are much more active than Android users in any possible usage statistic available (they spend more time on their devices, buy more, browse the Internet more etc).

Good design withdraws from experience and lets me do my stuff.

Once we understand this phenomenon, we can see why any radical redesign of the iOS operating system at this point in time would really be a bad idea! As a geek, I would probably enjoy indulging in its newness, but as a user it would disrupt my flow. I would have to deal with the changes, I would have to re-learn. Users don’t want to learn devices, they want to use them. That is why evolutionary changes, step by step, improvements here and there, in easily digestible portions will just do the trick for most of us (users). No geek or tech commentator gets excited by this (they want new features, new UI, bold changes), but it works for the user. I am glad Apple understands this and keeps it that way.

When Apple wants to be bold they create a new device category, a new market, a new ecosystem, in short they change the world. But applying revolutionary changing to an already existing (and working!) ecosystem is really not a good idea.

Recently, I have again been irritated by a couple of blog posts about the problems that the term “social” seems to create when used in a business context. Here is my (polite) rant on the topic:

There seems to be a problem with the word social in particular when one wants to convince executives of the benefits of Enterprise Social Media.

Social it seems raises red flags in that any social business initiative is suspected to be a scheme for avoiding work and procrastination.

To address the problem it has been suggested to replace the term “social” with “network”, “open”, “collaboration” or avoid it altogether (e.g. to talk about Enterprise Collaboration Networks or just Enterprise Networks).

Frankly, I find these suggestions bizarre and dangerous. Since when is the term social considered anti-business or even taken to be a swear word?

A quick look at Wikipedia confirms that social is a pretty innocent term. Depending on  context the term refers to:

• The collective co-existence with others.
• An objectively given fact characterising humans as inherently social beings.
• Attitudes or behaviours displayed by people when they take account of the interests or needs of other people.

Hence, social either means just being with other people, or to behave unselfishly taking others into account. At no point does it say that social might be the opposite to terms such as “working effectively”, “doing business” or “being rational”. If anything the opposite of social is selfish, acting with no regard for other people.

If social behavior means to take the needs of others into account how can this be regarded negative in the workplace? And what does it say about a person if they think that is to be avoided and has no place in business.

On the contrary, isn’t all business necessarily and by definition social?

So, should we avoid the term? – No! Of course not.

Will that make it harder to sell the idea of social business to (some!) executives?  – Maybe.

But in my view it is dangerous to give in to an overly reductionist management attitude that tries to free all business matters of “social” aspects and reduce it to rationalistic task execution. This needs to be resisted in my view. Not (only) because it is the right thing to do, but because it is good for business.

The whole point of the recent push for social business is to recognize that work in a modern knowledge economy has as much to do with effective task execution as it has with engaging in ongoing conversations and sense-making with others about the work we are engaging in together. How else can the organization innovate, change, adapt and evolve with the changes that go on around us in an economy that is being disrupted by the emergence of a stream of new digital technologies?

It is precisely in the vision of initiatives such as ESN to point out that overly reductionist approaches to management and work are not suited to cope with the demands of digital change.

So, my argument is that if we avoid the term social we are complying with the rules of the very game we need to change.

What we should do is educating people about the social nature of business, not pretending it’s not. Recognising that all business is social is an attitude, a state of mind that is a prerequisite for success in our changing economy.

But there is still hope. It might well be that being cautious about social when approaching executives is more a reflex anticipating resistance than a reflection of actual management attitudes. I know many managers and executives who are well aware of the need to engage with social business, their questions often naturally revolve more around the ‘how’ not the ‘if’.

What is Digital Disruption?

Co-authored by Kai Riemer and Robert B. Johnston

Digital disruption refers to changes enabled by digital technologies that occur at a pace and magnitude that disrupt established ways of value creation, social interactions, doing business and more generally our thinking.

Digital Disruption can be seen as both a threat and an opportunity:

• ICT-induced change happens at a pace and scale that impacts on existing business practice in disruptive ways, threatening and invalidating existing business models.
• Digital technologies offer new opportunities for the creation of innovate business models for entrepreneurs to compete with established business practices in a wide range of industries.

Digital Disruption can occur on various levels:

1. Disruptions to individual life practices (example: Mobile connectivity disrupts established work-life boundaries)
2. Disruptions to work practices (example: Narrating work via microblogging in the workplace changes what counts as (valuable) work)
3. Disruptions to business practices (example: Workplace social media disrupts the way information travels in the organisation and induces shifts in power relationships)
4. Disruptions to industry structures (example: Digitisation of media content and user-generated content disrupts traditional value chains of content production and delivery)
5. Disruptions to societal systems (example: Social media participation disrupts traditional practices of public opinion making)

While the above examples point to profound changes to established business practices, they do not fully illustrate what exactly makes these changes truly disruptive.

In the following we will outline our thoughts on the topic.

What is disruptive about digital change?

Our observation is that disruptive change is change that disrupts our understanding of the world.

Digital disruption changes the basis on which we make sense of, give meaning to and understand our business and work-life practices.

An example might illustrate this. The emergence of devices such as the iPad has changed fundamentally not only how we consume data and documents, how we communicate, how we learn and how we perform various business practices but also more fundamentally our understanding of what a computer or phone is, what counts as a workplace, or what an appropriate business meeting looks like. In consequence it has also brought about new professional identities such as that of the modern tech-savvy road warrior manager.

The nature and magnitude of these changes was hardly predictable when the iPad was released (it is worth googling and reading the commentary at the time). Rather, they are the result of continuous social sense-making and adaption processes.

We argue that digital disruption does not simply change markets, or present innovative business ideas (although that is one result).

Digital disruption is not merely the digitisation of an existing business model or the replacement with a digital alternative, such as putting University lecture content online or selling products through online shops. This is a far too limited understanding.

How to understand Digital Disruption?

Disruptive change cannot be grasped by merely extrapolating into the future what we know today. Such an attempt at forecasting leaves out that actors within traditional business practices innovate using digital technologies, they do not merely stand still and wait to be disrupted by some mysterious force.

More importantly, as these business practices change so does our understanding of what counts as meaningful, valuable, and the right way of performing these business practices, which brings about further changes.

Consequently, the main argument is that some digital innovations disrupt the very basis on which we understand the concepts by which any extrapolations into the future are made, such as ‘business value’, ‘communication’, ‘what counts as a transaction or content or a product’, ‘ ways of working’, ‘what counts as a workplace’ and so on.

Forecasting the impact of digital disruption becomes impossible when the disruption occurs to the very basis on which we create a predictive model. When what counts as a fact changes, any attempt to build a prediction on the known facts of today will fail. All data collection, even big data, involves some data selection and interpretations which are always based on these notions of self-evident fact.

What can we do then?

What is needed instead is a better understanding of how to cope with and shape disruption, how to engage in productive sense-making processes in order to advance our understanding of industry processes, business value etc. and thus to innovate and adapt as digital disruption unfolds within a particular sector or industry.

As a consequence, we need more:

1. foundational research into the particular nature and structure of disruptive change processes and
2. applied research initiatives as part of an ongoing sense-making and adaption process in order to shape the disruptive processes as they occur in particular sectors and industries.

Our latest study has just been released (with @arimue). From an analysis of five Enterprise Social Networking cases we have identified a comprehensive catalogue of ESN use cases and integrated them into a framework. We hope that this S.O.C.I.A.L. framework will not only provide a good overview of emergent ESN benefits, but also illustrate the variety of potential ESN uses in a catchy way!

For the full report, which includes a table with detailed use case descriptions, as well as case scenarios and data from the cases please download the full report as pdf here (pdf at bottom of the page):

Riemer, K; Richter, A. (2012): S.O.C.I.A.L. – Emergent Enterprise Social Networking Use Cases: A Multi Case Study Comparison, BIS Working Paper, The University of Sydney.

It seems like a taken-for-granted wisdom now that we speak of the “flattening of hierarchies” when we talk about Enterprise Social Networking (ESN). The simplified argument goes something like the following: “With ESN anyone in the organisation can have a say, which shifts the way influence and power in the organisation operates. Hierarchies become obsolete, because power in this new world stems from knowledge and contribution, not from a place in the hierarchy”.

But this line of reasoning has two main problems in my view: 1) it uses a straw man argument, 2) it applies a limited understanding of hierarchies.

1) The straw man argument

The argument assumes that traditionally (before ESN) power, communication and information flows in organisations would operate along hierarchical command chains. Quite obviously however for most organisations this is not true anyway. Rather, social networks and personal relationships have always been the source of information and power for individuals in organisations.

The role of ESN: What changes with the proliferation of ESN however is that it creates new social networks that have the power to by-pass the networks of old. ESN creates transparency, allows information to flow more freely and it brings to the fore the actual contributors of ideas and new knowledge. This in turn shifts the power between those that have ideas and those which were formerly able to control the (intransparent) social network, to appropriate ideas or use information as a scarce resource.

2) Limited understanding of the role of hierarchy

Hierarchies are often seen as a stand-in for top-down power and the chain of command in decision making and execution. However, hierarchies in organisations have a much more important function than that. Hierarchies give people something to aspire, they are part of our natural progression in our jobs “up the latter”. They exert an important motivational function. And most managers understand anyway that control and power are a tad more complex than the limited top-down stereotype.

The role of ESN: However, ESN allows people to become much more aware of each other. Across the hierarchy, but also horizontally across organisational functions (the silos). Information thus traverses the hierarchy much more freely.

Consequently, a fully adopted ESN might ‘devalue’ the intransparent behind-the-scenes social networks that allowed well-connected individuals to exploit their broker position within network. Where these individuals might have been able to collect, appropriate, and selectively withhold and spoon-feed their information previously, with ESN it becomes much more transparent who has got the good ideas and something to contribute.

Hence, ESN does not really devalue the concept of organisational hierarchy – hierarchies are here to stay, someone needs to be in charge after all, and we all aspire that next promotion – but it has the tendency to devalue the shadow networks that operate in the background. And that might not be such a bad thing.

I gave this keynote speech at the CIO Strategy Summit in Surfers Paradise, at the Gold Coast, Australia on 28 August 2012. In the presentation I outline the particular nature of ESN as a social infrastructure (as opposed to a tool) and spell out the implications this has for roll-out and adoption, as well as for how successful adoption can be facilitated. The talk begins by explaining that all human artifacts become defined in practice.

The most important slides from this presentation can be downloaded from Slideshare.

Sydney University Business School features me in a short video on its website this week:

 

In the space of enterprise social networking (ESN) we hear a lot about the tension between “doing work” and “being social”, or that “social does not have a place in business”. Now, where does this tension come from?

To understand what is at work here, we need to take a look at how modern formal organisations have evolved. The core concept of formal organisation is the concept of “roles”. Roles in organisations lay out abstract operational requirements (what the role has to do) with the idea that people take on these roles as a professional persona and leave behind their private/personal personas for the time that they fulfil their professional duties (of the role).

In essence, the very idea of the modern formal organisation is to enforce ‘professional’ behaviour at the expense of ‘personal’ (or ‘social’) behaviours.

Now, it is easy to see how the introduction of social technologies into the workplace creates tensions:

1. ESN technologies such as Yammer, Jive or Socialcast structure their user experience around public social technologies such as Facebook and Twitter. Hence, the adoption of ESNs deliberatly draws on and invokes the social behaviours that people have learned in the private context.
2. The very benefits of social technologies lies in breaking down the barriers between formal work and socialising in the workplace.

Now here is where the tension lies: While we expect people to draw on and import their knowledge of social technologies from their private contexts, at the same time we do not want them to import the associated behaviours, which are seen to revolve around chatting, time wasting and procrastination.

The good news however is, which we see  in the research that we are doing, that users by and large are much better able to draw the line between professional and personal than decision makers think they are. Users understand perfectly well that ESN create public spaces where everyone can see what one is doing. As I’ve argued before, people do not go in there to push the boundaries of normal social conduct. And if something inappropriate happens, the group is normally quick to sort out things for everyone to see, which creates strong norms of professional (and social!) behaviour.

The key I guess is placing trust in people, to see them not as abstract bearers of organisational roles, but as professionals in what they do.

In response to our Yammer study at Deloitte, I have been asked why there is so little “real work” being done on Yammer in that case, even though it is such a mature network?

As background: We found in our study that Yammer has been adopted by Deloitte primarily as a channel for creating context and awareness (to know what’s going on in the business), for information sharing, problem-solving and crowdsourcing of ideas, but not for project management, task coordination or working on joint content objects (such as on Yammer pages).

Now in my view the answer is simple:

The fact that we do not see much “real work” (e.g. working on a content object or task coordination), is not despite, but because they are a mature Yammer network! Since Deloitte have adopted Yammer at a time when no pages etc existed they have naturally adopted it as an awareness channel. Therefore, Yammer is not (yet) seen as a place to do work, but as a place to learn what’s going on within the wider organisation. Also another reason is that they are a large business, so the primary value of Yammer is in creating awareness for what’s going on beyond one’s own division (silo!).

Generally, it is much more likely for organisations to take on board these new features during initial adoption when people experiment with the new technology, new practice emerge and when it is yet to be determined what Yammer will become in that particular organisation.

Reference

Riemer, Kai; Scifleet, Paul; Reddig, Ruwen (2012): Powercrowd: Enterprise Social Networking in Professional Service Work: A Case Study of Yammer at Deloitte Australia, Sydney University Working Paper:
http://hdl.handle.net/2123/8352
(download the full pdf from this site).

In today’s service economy many businesses revolve around knowledge-intensive work. A good example are professional service firms. For these companies effective communication and knowledge sharing are crucial capabilities. Against his backdrop enterprise social media such as social network platforms promise to provide individuals with new means for connecting, communicating and exchanging ideas in easy to use, straight-forward ways.

In our latest study we have analysed the role and benefits of the Yammer social networking and microblogging service within professional service provider Deloitte Australia. Deloitte has been an early adopter of Yammer and has achieved wide-spread adoption and use of Yammer across all of its service lines. Much like in earlier studies (e.g. this one) we have undertaken a genre analysis and hand-coded more than 1,800 blog posts over a two week period, which provides a representative example of Yammer-enabled communicative practices that emerged within the Deloitte Yammer network. We analysed and interpreted our results against the requirements of knowledge-intensive work practices.

We find that Yammer fulfils four knowledge-related functions for Deloitte (for detailed descriptions of the communication practices please download the full report as pdf):

1. Providing input: A key ingredient of all knowledge work is new information input. In Yammer Deloitte a significant number of posts serve the purpose of sharing new information such as articles, files, links to web pages or otherwise information that users think might be interesting and relevant for their colleagues. This practice lays the seeds for those serendipitous moments where one unexpectedly finds new and relevant information.
2. Creating new knowledge: An interesting practice in Deloitte we founds we term Idea generation, which play out as a form of shared online brainstorming sessions, initiated by users with the aim of creating new knowledge, such as ideas for products, projects, meetings or other events. For a detailed description please see table 2 in the full report.
3. Harnessing existing knowledge: Users are aware of the value of the social network on Yammer. They draw on existing expertise actively and explicitly when they have a problem. In the genre category Problem solving and Advice we are able to witness “knowledge in action”. This represents the most work-related activity that takes place in the Yammer space. Yammer is an effective way for having questions answered, but also for learning about other people’s expertise and for accessing the geographically dispersed expertise of one’s colleagues in an almost instantaneous fashion.
4. Building the social fabric: Effective communication and knowledge work requires people to develop a shared background, a phenomenon that has previously been described as common ground or mutual knowledge. Yammer is serving that purpose: through discussions of industry matters, current affaires and the sharing of status updates people get to know each other, learn what is held important by people in the organisation, and how others interpret and talk about matters of interest. What emerges is a shared background that is the foundation for all other knowledge work to happen. This background is essential! Only if people are aware of what others are doing and what they are interested in can they post the relevant information that provides the foundation for serendipity to happen. A shared background is also important to understand and interpret other people’s questions and their input.

The figure below summarises these findings. At the same time, we also find that a number of knowledge-work practices are not carried out within Yammer, even though we found these practices in some of our earlier enterprise microblogging cases:

• Task coordination: In an earlier study of software development teams we found that microblogging served as a task- and team-focused coordination medium. In this case, it resembled a stream of activity and awareness-related posts on which people can draw to enable coordination and alignment of immediate shared task matters.
• Project management: In yet another case, we found practices of project management whereby microblogging was used to coordinate and organise shared project meetings.
• Information storage: In both of the above cases, we observed that users posted into the shared space “notes to self” (or to the team) with attached files for later reference. The practice evolves around using the platform as an unstructured storage space, where information is later accessed facilitated by tagging and a powerful search function.

It is easy to see why Yammer in Deloitte is not used in these ways. The user group does not share (as a whole) an immediate work context, such as shared work tasks or projects. The group is much larger, more diverse and dispersed as in the above-mentioned two cases. Yammer in Deloitte Australia connects a large group of people, it creates an online community and awareness of what is going on in the organisation, as well as a space for crowdsourcing ideas and problem solutions. It provides an example of what has been described as a personalisation approach to knowledge management, where the focus is on dialogue between individuals, not knowledge objects in a database.

The full report

Riemer, Kai; Scifleet, Paul; Reddig, Ruwen (2012): Powercrowd: Enterprise Social Networking in Professional Service Work: A Case Study of Yammer at Deloitte Australia, Sydney University Working Paper:
http://hdl.handle.net/2123/8352
(download the full pdf from this site). UPDATE: pdf has been corrected!